The Humor unit was created in order to help us relieve some stress while we were working on zenith; our biggest project of the year. Before creating our own comedic piece, we experimented with a variety of comedic improvisation exercises, studied various professional pieces of visual, written, and spoken humor, and learned comedic terms and techniques. We had the opportunity to choose between stand up comedy, a comedic narrative, a commencement speech, and satire to perform in front of our class.

I ended up partnering up with my friend, and we decided to create a product and make a comedic commercial that pokes fun at many weight loss products out on the market. We put together a short commercial that has very bad editing, cheesy sound effects, and laughable scenes.

 

Comedic Influences

Before we created our project, we were asked to study two comedic influences and write a bit about them.

Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart has been active since 2001 as a stand-up comedian and an actor in films and television. The genres he uses are; observational comedy, black comedy, surreal humor, insult comedy, and satire. He focuses on subjects such as African-American culture, American politics, current events, everyday life, human sexuality, marriage, parenting, pop cultures, race relations, racism, and self-deprecation. Hart first started doing stand up. His first performance was at the “Laff House” in Philadelphia, and he performed under the name “Lil Kev.” Apparently, this did not go well. The following several acts did not go well either. It took him to start performing stand-up competitively to actually improve. He has been in at least 45 movies and plays a comedy role in most. I thought of Kevin Hart because he has a couple of shows on Netflix, which are pre-recordings of his stand up comedy acts. Since he is a shorter guy he plays that up in movies and tries to act tough, like in Jumanji, and often makes fun of himself during his performances.

Jonah Hill

Jonah Hill has been active since 2004, as a screenwriter, actor, comedian, and producer. He actually started writing his own plays and performing them at the “Black and White” Bar in the East Village Neighborhood of New York City. He has been in 45 movies, and nominated for an Oscar from the film “Moneyball”. He made his debut in the movie “I Heart Huckabees”. He is known for the 21 jump street series, in which I was particularly interested in. After watching the movie and the sequel, I was particularly interested in Hill’s way of conveying the humor. Since this is pre-recorded, I find analyzing his ways of talking and acting helpful to me, when I make my commercial, since that will be pre-recorded as well. In the movie, he acts as the sidekick of Channing Tatum, because he’s not as macho as him. He still lives with his mom in the movie from what I recall, so that adds to the humor. So, throughout the whole movie, he tries his hardest to be the alpha as well and conveys his character very well through acting, which is what I hope to achieve as well. It’s a raunchy comedy and uses many instances of blue humor. Not that this is something we would use, but it is an example of how it stays constant throughout the whole movie, so it has a sort of flow in a way.

Humorist Study Reflection 

I believe that engaging and connecting with the audience is very crucial to create an effective performance. Therefore creating something relatable is adequate to do so. I also think that connecting everything that is said is also important. I often see stand up comedians who either have a successful or unsuccessful performance, and I think that has to do with how well they tie everything together. If everything that is said is off topic, it confuses the audience rather than make them laugh. Lead-ins are successful ways into doing this, as I have seen, as you can ease one way out of the topic into another. Since I am making a pre-recorded comedic narrative, I will have the opportunity to plan and generate a flow of the recording to ensure that it can humor in the right places and time. We are going to do a commercial, so it’s technically a sort of parody of real life. Commercials try to sway you to purchase products, and really talk about what they are selling up, but since we are trying to make it funny, we will make the product silly and undesirable. Just as Kevin Hart wasn’t successful on his first try, nor the fifth try, it is important to note that not everything will be accepted by the audience as well as what we may think. So one helpful thing may be to show many people the commercial before coming to class, so if something is not working well, we can see it and change it before actually getting graded. Since we are able to get this pre-recording opportunity, it will hopefully enhance the product, since we won’t be nervous up front in real life. Based on what the test groups of the recording are, we can revise accordingly.

Our Inspiration 

 SNL,  fully “Saturday Night Live,” has been “Live from New York for more than four decades” and it is a show where “celebrity hosts join an award-winning ensemble cast to perform comedic sketches, satirical news and digital shorts, alongside popular musical acts.” Many of SNL’s skits go viral, and one of their skits that we drew inspiration from was their Amazon Alexa Silver commercial. SNL created a fake product, Amazon Alexa Silver, and made a parody commercial for it. After watching it, we decided that we wanted to create our own parody commercial for our humor project.

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode

Our Project

We came up with a product, called “diet water,” that’s supposed to help you lose weight without working out even if you eat unhealthy foods. We created this in order to poke fun at the weight loss industry, and we embarrassed ourselves, used hyperboles, bad editing, and cheesy sound effects in order to make people laugh. We created a logo for “diet water” and taped it on a bottle, stuffed pillows in our jackets to make us look bigger, filmed some funny scenes, photoshopped images of ourselves for the “before and after” photos, and put it all together into a video despite having some challenges due to our limited editing and filming skills.

When making our video, we created our script on the spot. Here is what we wrote down when brainstorming.

“Are you tired of being overweight, but don’t want to workout? Try Diet water! With our new advanced form innovations that slim you down after every meal. *Go to Mickey D’s and get some food, have diet water with us.* Want to order 4 big macs? No problem! Just drink some diet water! Don’t wait! Call now! We will throw in an extra one, making a pack of 20 for a total $10,000 flat! Or visit our site, www.dietwater.com”

Here is our video that we created!

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode

During class, we shared our comedic influences and played our video for our classmates. The recording of that is below.

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode